Episode 1 – Amazing job interviews with Jon Gregory

November 25, 2014 Podcast

It’s here! The first session of The Graduate Job Podcast!

In this first episode, I speak with author and career coach Jon Gregory as we focus on the topic of interviews. We explore how to ace telephone interviews through to tips for having amazing face to face interviews, and everything else in between.

You can download the podcast to your computer or listen to it here on the blog. Additionally, you can subscribe via iTunes or Stitcher radio.

MORE SPECIFICALLY IN THIS EPISODE YOU’LL LEARN ABOUT:

    • The correct mindset needed to excel in interviews – 2.12
    • The need for thorough preparation – 2.56
    • How to give natural-sounding answers by using the Spotlight process – 3.16
    • How to prepare for interviews – 8.28
    • How to build rapport during telephone interviews – 12.31
    • How to ace face to face interviews – 14.27
    • How candidates can differentiate themselves in interviews – 15.43
    • Topics to avoid during interviews – 17.08
    • How to face difficult interview questions – 18.21
    • How to answer a question about your salary expectations – 20.19
    • How to answer a question about your biggest weakness – 21.05
    • How to respond to a question about whether you are currently interviewing elsewhere – 22.51
    • Techniques for dealing with lateral thinking questions – 25.36
    • How to deal with your mind going blank during an interview – 27.38
    • Questions to ask the interviewer at the end of an interview – 29.50

LINKS AND RESOURCES MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE:

Please leave an honest review and rating on iTunes! They are extremely helpful and I read each and every one of them.

Transcript – Episode 1 – Amazing Interviews with Jon Gregory

Announcer: Welcome to the Graduate Job Podcast, your home for weekly information and inspiration to help you get the graduate job of your dreams.

James: Hello, my name is James Curran and I’m very proud to welcome you to the first edition of the graduate job podcast, a new weekly podcast where each episode we explore a different aspect of the graduate recruitment process with leading authors, coaches and recruiters and experts who can help you to get the graduate job of your dreams.

In this first edition I speak to author Jon Gregory and we cover the topic of interviews, from how to ace telephone interviews through to tips to have amazing face to face interviews, and everything else in between. Don’t worry about writing anything down as links and a transcript can be found in the show notes at graduatejobpodcast.com/amazinginterviews. So without further ado, let’s go straight to episode 1.

James: So I am very excited today to have with us Jon Gregory, career coach and author of Winning That Job: A Kill or Be-Killed Guide to Job Search and Interview Preparation for Students and Graduates.

Jon, welcome to the Graduate Job Podcast.

Jon Gregory: Thank you, James. It’s my pleasure to be here.

James: Thanks for joining us today; great to have you on the show.

For those listeners who haven’t read your book, Winning That Job, or seen your website, would you like to introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about what you do?

Jon Gregory: Yeah, sure. I’m an author, editor, and blogger and trainer; and I work in the field of job search, application and interview technique, training for people. I concentrate a lot, as you might expect, on students and graduates. I edit win-that-job.com which is a site which provides free advice for job hunters, and I also blog from there.

James: Excellent, and I’d recommend any listeners to go visit the site. The links will be in the show notes.

So today we are going to cover an aspect of recruitment, the recruitment process which people find particularly daunting, which is interviews. In your book, Jon, you talk a lot about the correct mindset, which is a big part of the book, and what advice would you give someone before they even get near the interview itself with regards to getting in the right mindset for finding a job?

Jon Gregory:   I think you have to walk in with a high degree of confidence and self belief that you can go into that room and hit the spot and win it. I think if you can’t do that before you go in, then, you know, your odds, I guess, sink back to relatively random. What’s absolutely essential, I think, is to say that the more that you can prepare for the questions and for the interview that you’re about to face, then the more chance that you have.  And a lot comes down to research and rehearsal and then relating to the people as you are going in. And if you can kind of mentally plan and put yourself in the right frame to follow through that framework, then your odds increase quite markedly.

James: And you talk a big part in the book about preparation and the need for really, really thorough preparation.

Jon Gregory: Yes, indeed. There are certain techniques that you can use in order to prepare yourself. So, let’s assume that you have done a lot of research and you’re sitting down to try and calculate out for yourself what type of questions that you might face. There’s a process called the Spotlight process which can help you to really get a handle on how you’re going to answer those questions when they come up because the problem, of course, is that when you can predict the questions beforehand, but A; they may not come up and B; they may not come up in exactly the way that you’ve imagined that they might.   So the Spotlight process helps you to handle those two situations.

James: Yeah, I find when I’ve been doing telephone interviews, one of the problems that you come across with candidates is they often have a very set idea about what answer they’re going to give and they tend to give that answer regardless of what the actual question was.

Jon Gregory: Yeah, it’s absolutely vital that people don’t answer the question they wished had been asked; they answer the one that actually has been asked. It’s surprisingly hard to do that.

James: You mentioned the Spotlight process. Can you go into more detail about what it is and the steps you take to follow that through?

Jon Gregory: Yeah, I can.   So your starting point, really, is to imagine the types of questions that you might be asked relative to the role that you’re looking at. And I think the key to that is doing the front-end analysis and background research. We can kind of talk about that in a minute, if you want to. Having done all that, that will enable you to dream up the questions that you might get asked. With the Spotlight process what I recommend people do is to sit down and then for each of those questions to actually handwrite out for themselves an answer to that question. Do it in the way that they might speak, rather than thinking about being grammatically correct and getting all the punctuation in the right place and getting all the format correct and getting the order correct. Literally do it almost as a stream of consciousness to answer the question and they work through all the questions in the same way.

Now, the end of it, what people are able to do is to then stand up, read out the question and then read out the answer that they’ve written and what they should find is that they’re dealing with something that’s a lot more natural than simply constructing an answer and then readying that out. So, firstly, already, it’s going to be a lot more natural.

The second step then is to put the notes down and then to work through the questions and answers and speak them out loud one by one. Speak out the answers one by one and what people should find is that by writing previously, handwriting for reference, they’ve internalized the information and they’ve internalized the way that they’ll delivery it. And what comes out is your subconscious delivering answers to the questions that come up. Now, okay, let’s assume that the exact questions come up and okay, that’s going to be a fairly easy process. On the plus side your answers are going to be not at all stilted. They’re going to be quite natural because you’ve originally generated them in a way that you would naturally speak them. Let’s assume that the questions don’t come up in the exact way that you expected. Then what you’ll find is that if you’ve been fairly thorough with your rehearsals, your mind – because you’ve already internalized a lot of this information – will be able to cherry pick from that the sections that you most need when you need them. So that when that spotlight does turn on to you and suddenly you’re asked a question, rather than your brain freezing, your subconscious is already digging through and dredging up the relevant sections that you are going to need to need to deliver. You can then crack on delivering those almost automatically but in a very natural way and your brain is, in fact, your conscious brain is still free then to be thinking about how you’re presenting yourself, what might be coming up next, looking for feedback signals from the interviewer and so on. So that’s a broad outline of the Spotlight process and it’s to do with that internalization.

James: I love this approach and when I was reading it through and thinking back to the times I’ve been successful in interviews, it was a realization that I’d broadly followed the same thing as having the knowledge so that you’re not just regurgitating it by rote and you’re also able to adapt it to the different nuances that the each different company will put on certain competency and enable you to answer the different questions put to you as opposed to the question you want to answer.

Jon Gregory: Yeah. Certainly the more natural that you can sound with it and obviously the more confident, the more you’re going to be able to relate to the interviewer opposite you and the more you’re going to sound as though you’re a good fit for the role. It can make a very, very significant difference.

I don’t think there’s any problem at all in pausing to think through how you’re going to answer something but if you’re stuttering through answering something, you come across as a lot less confident. If it happens it happens, work through it and move on but if you can avoid doing that, great. And if that means that you’re one step ahead of the other candidates that are applying and being interviewed, excellent. And the real key behind it all is research at the front end. If you don’t plug the research into that Spotlight process – it’s like the old computer maxim – garbage in, garbage out.

James: You mentioned preparation earlier. So if we take it back then to the beginning of the process. So imagine today I get an email today telling me that I’ve got a telephone interview in a couple of weeks. What preparation should I start then? How deep do I need to research into the company?

Jon Gregory: If you’ve got an email or a communication saying that you’ve got an interview, then in fact, you’ll already have quite a lot of research behind that presumably because you’ve gone through a process of application. So that’s a good starting point, is first to re-read that.

Secondly, look at the advert for the role that you’re applying for and out of that try and really understand the context of that role. And you need to understand it in the context of the organization; where it sits, what sort of challenges it faces; where it is it in the industry; what are its recent challenges in terms of has it been suffering financially; has it been doing very well; is it launching a new product? For the department that you will be working in, how does that relate to the challenge that the organization faces? Are they in the middle of a desperate turnaround, struggling for survival, or are they fighting off a takeover? You know, the types of situations that the organization can be facing are almost limitless, but if you can understand that climate, then you can position yourself to be planning to take on the role that you’re applying for and then do an effective job. That’s what the interviewer really, really wants, is to find somebody who can step into that role and be effective. So if you can show that you understand the role, the company, the industry, and the climate, then you are nine-tenths of the way there to winning that job. That’s for sure.   The rest then is plugging that into your preparation.

James:   When I was used to conduct telephone interviews, it was always a litmus test, the question of what can you tell me about company X and you’d have some candidates who, you know, they knew everything. They knew the CEO, the latest figures. They knew the breakdown of all the departments and you almost had to tell them, you know, whoa, okay. That’s brilliant. You can stop there. But then there will be other candidates who you’d ask them that question, now, what do you know about this company that you’re applying for, and it was almost as if they were shocked that you asked them that and they could tell you one or two lines. And you think two minutes into the interview you knew that odds were they weren’t going to be able to, they weren’t going to get the job.

Jon Gregory: It is. It’s a big fail, unfortunately which is a shame because in fact otherwise they may be fairly competent candidate. But certainly knowing nothing about the company and the role is a bit disastrous and the worst time to ask the question is when they say to you at the end, have you got any questions to ask? Can you tell me a bit about your company? It’s all a bit late at that point. You’re well past the relevance.

The other side of that coin that you just mentioned there is, of course, the candidate that doesn’t bang on relentlessly about all the latest figures and you know, can quote for the last 14 years annual reports and all the rest of it. It gets to be a bit too mechanical at the other end of the scale and people have clearly just dug in and learned something by rote.   What the interviewer would really want to be confident of is well, okay. Look, you can read stuff back same as anybody else can. Do you actually understand it? Can you fit you and the role you will be doing into that situation and into our company, and then be effective?

So I find what you need to do when they say, well, what do you know about our company, is be pretty short, pretty sharp, pretty focused and then talk about how you can contribute towards what they’re trying to achieve. And you can go honestly say, look, I believe you’re trying to achieve this and then explain how you might fit into that picture. That’s a very, very, very strong position to be starting from.

James: Absolutely. And sticking with telephone interviews, what advice would you give for being able to build rapport over the call?

Jon Gregory: Yeah, it’s fantastically difficult; isn’t it? Because you’re sitting in your own surroundings, wherever they are, you can’t get visual feedback. It’s actually quite hard to get audible feedback as well. You may or may not.   What you need to do is assume that it’s coming. You need to smile and you need to consciously like the person that you’re dealing with. Now, that all sounds a bit weird, but it does have a very strong impact on how you present yourself then over that telephone call. Simply smiling down the phone sounds as though it’s completely nuts, but in fact it does work and it does shift your tone on a subconscious level and the way that you’re communicating and the person at the receiving end will pick that up. If you look, all of the – well, certainly an awful lot of the training that telesales people go through begins with that issue of smiling.

The one about liking the person that you’re dealing with is slightly weird, but again, it’s something that does work.   Again, if you dislike somebody, it begins to come across in your tone. Even if you try and hide it, people can sense it. So if you’re consciously liking somebody and I like the sound of this person, they sound quite attractive – I don’t necessarily mean physically but they just sound attractive to you, they sound interesting to you, your interest in the role, your interest on what they’ve got to say, how they’re going to run this telephone interview, it’s all going to be giving that person positive feedback and they’re going to be picking that up from you and feeling much more positive about you. So it gets locked into a cycle and that only works in your favour.

James:  Absolutely; so moving on through the assessment process. So, we talked about telephone interviews. Then if the candidate moves on to face to face interviews, how does the objective then change from the first interview to the second interview?

Jon Gregory: The objective changes with every single interview that you face and your objective is simply, only, to win that particular stage that you’re facing. So for example – being ludicrous about it – when you’re applying you’re not trying to win that job. You’re trying to get an interview. And now when you’re attending an interview, are you trying to win that job? Well, that’s the important thing to do, is to understand so what’s the process that I’m facing here? When I’m done with this and the meeting we’re having here, who will I have to see afterwards, if anybody? Do you need me to sit tests? Is there a group interview? Do I need to meet somebody further up in the organization? So it’s really, really essential to understand that process and that enables you at each stage to clearly set your own objective for that meeting because it is just to pass, not to win the job.   That can make a very big difference to a candidate’s prospects.

James: And once candidates get to the face to face interview stage. What are some of the key ways they can differentiate themselves from the average candidate?

Jon Gregory: Positive body language, as they walk into the room; being very positive in meeting the people; good firm handshake; good eye contact; smiling; again, liking the person. Think as you’re smiling, I like this person, just sets you off on the right foot and that should then set them off in the right foot. You can be unlucky and the person can be absolutely dead that you’re facing, just like a cold fish. The thing is not to be daunted by that. If they’re doing it to you, they’re doing it to everybody. So, okay, sometimes it’s a technique. Sometimes the people opposite you just do not relate well to other people. You just have to handle it, but if you start off on that right foot and keep looking, what you’re trying to do is build a rapport with the interviewer. But not trying to necessarily unduly influence them, but just ensure that whatever you’re going to deliver, they’re going to see it in a positive light and they’re going to feel positively about you. If you walk in, you’re scowling, you’re slouching, you don’t quite know what you’re doing, you know, you don’t whether to sit down, stand up, walk over, shake hands, it gives the wrong signals. It says, this is a very unconfident individual, and you need to avoid that at all costs.

James: Well, you touched there on some of the things that you shouldn’t do, what other key aspects should people make sure they don’t do in an interview?

Jon Gregory: Always focus on the positives. Stay away from the negatives. So perhaps you’ve had a bad experience in your last job? Don’t bang all about it.   Don’t even mention it if you don’t have to, unless it’s directly relevant and or unless they bring it up. If they do bring it up and it was a bad experience, don’t lie about it. Be honest with it and explain and show how okay, that was the situation you faced, that’s what happened, you’ve dealt with it and you’ve put it behind you. You’ve learned from it and you’ve moved on.   That last thing anybody wants to hear is a half hour diatribe on how absolutely evil your last boss was and how everybody else agreed, and how even the organization agreed and after you left they sacked him anyway. I mean, nobody really, really wants that level of detail and all that emotional stuff. It’s showing you’re mired in the past. You’re not looking forward. You’re not thinking about what you can do for the organization you’re now meeting. You know, you’re still carrying this emotional garbage. At all costs you’ve got to let it go and move forwards.

James: I definitely agree.

So thinking then around specific questions that people might face, what key questions are there that would come up no matter what the interview and the people need to prepare for?

Jon Gregory: Oh, just the basics like, can you tell me a little bit about yourself? You mentioned one earlier, what do you know about our organization? An absolutely standard question is probably, why are you applying for this position? What skills will you be bringing to this role? What do you have that makes us believe that we should offer you the job? All of those sorts of questions very commonly crop up. What are your strengths? What are your weaknesses? There’s a whole list of – I would call them – “standard” interview questions that will get thrown and you can prepare very thoroughly for those.

James: You mentioned using the Spotlight technique; just making sure that you’ve got answers ready to go for each of these.

Jon Gregory:   You can, yes. Times change and interview techniques have moved on an awful lot over the last few years. Competency based questions are now much more common. And it’s not so easy to imagine the types of questions that you will be asked with a competency type question. So, for example, something like, tell me about a situation where you had to step forward and show some leadership. Now, it’s very, very hard to predict that that question will come up in that particular way. They could literally ask you anything about your background relating to the types of qualities that they’re looking for, for the person who will fill that role. It’s much harder to prepare in a standard way for those.

James: Definitely. And thinking about some specific difficult questions and the one that I always struggled with was around salary expectations. How would you recommend that people deal with this question?

Jon Gregory: If you possibly can, stay away from it at all costs. Dodge it. Skirt around it.   Refer to what was listed in the advert. They may have listed a particular figure or they may have listed a range, or they may have listed nothing at all. If there’s nothing at all, simply throw it back to them and ask them what the range is. At least it gives you a view.   Try and avoid making a demand and certainly never, ever negotiate, you know, during the interview.   Get the job first; then worry about the money, would always be my advice, if you possibly can.

James: And another difficult one, what would you say is your biggest weakness. What good strategies are there with dealing with this one?

Jon Gregory: Almost, almost everybody, I think, comes across as sounding a bit trite to these but it is very hard to deal with. You don’t want to really bang on about your weaknesses at great length because you don’t really want to have those weaknesses in the first place. The downside of that, if you don’t talk about any of them and say, well, I don’t really think I have any, somebody can throw back at you very easily, well, okay. So, there’s nothing that you can improve about yourself then? So, the focus really should be, try and identify a weakness that you’ve got and then turn it back into a positive and show how whatever it is, you’ve learned from it and you’ve begun to address it, if you haven’t already kind of moved past it. So a simple example might be something like somebody may describe themselves as quite impatient and particularly not suffering fools gladly and they’ve had the odd experience in the past where that didn’t go so well for them. They’ve learned from that experience. They’ve done X, Y and Z to try and move on from it and now they’ve trained themselves to be that little bit more patient to listen and develop their listening skills and to pause before responding. So in that way you’re showing an interviewer that you’ve learned from the past. You have got a weakness. You recognize it. You’re dealing with it and you’re trying to develop yourself. And that shows a particular mindset that you’ve got. So that’s the advantage of showing that weakness, is that you can show the mindset that you’ve got that is focused on developing.

James: Another question I’ve struggled with is when I was asked if I had any other applications on the go at the moment. What’s your take on how to approach this one? Is it good to be honest, even if you don’t have anything on the go? Or would it make sense to imply that you are further along the process with other companies?

Jon Gregory: Yeah. Again, that’s another tough one. I absolutely wouldn’t say, yeah, this is the only game in town and if I don’t get this, quite frankly, I’m stuffed. So I’m desperate and I’m really keen to come and work for you. You know, even if you get offered the job, it makes you sound like a loser and even if you do get offered the job, they’re probably going to nail you down in terms of salary offer at the end of it.

At the other end of the scale, you really don’t want to be naming names and saying yep, you know, I’m really pushing hard at this other organization, and sounding terribly enthusiastic about them because it leaves somebody with the feeling that well, okay, no matter what we do, actually, you’re probably going to go in that direction.

So the best advice, I think, is to be, is to stick with the general and again, try and make it not so that it’s not a trite answer. Something along the lines of, in fact, I’m looking for work in this particular field and I’m talking to a range of organizations. And out of that I confidently expect to find a role that will be offered to me. Try and keep it general. So make it very clear, actually, you know, you’re playing the market but you’re not doing that in a cold-hearted ruthless way. And you’re not trying to blackmail anybody.

James: Yeah, I agree. Thinking about, again, telephone interviews where I would have asked this question. Subconsciously you’re always swayed by the response that was given. So if they said, oh, I’ve applied with other people and I’ve not got through, then immediately you’re thinking, well, if our rivals have turned you down, then should we be really putting you through. And conversely people said they had offers from, again, competitors, you immediately almost in your head gave them higher value because, well, if they offered you a job then, you know, you’re probably someone that we should be speaking to.

Jon Gregory: Yep, and for living proof of that, I mean, you’ve only really got to look into the sales world. That’s why recommendations are used so strongly. You know, open the Radio Times, out falls a whole bunch of flyers, and there’s somebody famous who sold their soul to the company saying I’ve used this product and it’s absolutely fantastic. Endorsements win. Criticisms are very, very bad. And so, exactly as we were saying, if somebody were saying to you, if you’re explaining the, actually nobody else has picked me up and they’ve just rejected me, it looks bad.

James: Depending on the type of company and industry people are applying to they might face more lateral curveball questions; how many marbles are there in the UK or, you know, how do you fit a giraffe into a fridge type questions. What approach would you recommend for dealing with these ones that come completely out of the blue?

Jon Gregory: You have a good start by smiling; just buy yourself some time. The thing is, the important thing is not to be frightened of the question. Once you get that level of fear kicking in and the adrenaline kicks in, your mind goes blank and it gets much harder. Don’t be afraid to take a few seconds to think. It actually looks quite classy. If somebody is seeing that you’re taking the time to consider your answer, you go up in their estimation, not down, especially when they know that the questions they’re throwing at you are entirely unreasonable, which many of them are.   Thankfully, these types of questions are reducing now in their emphasis but yes, some companies do still use them and all you can really do is train yourself in advance just with practice and set yourself certain questions that literally have no answer and then just try and imagine a generic route through that you can take. So, for example, somebody says bla, bla, ping pong ball. Well, okay, you’ve got things like the substance it’s made out of; what it’s used for; what color it is; what other uses it can be put to; who uses it. So, if you can just get into the habit of just thinking flexibly, you’ll find those sorts of questions much easier to deal with when you’re actually faced with them.

James: I agree with what you said. I always find that candidates who have the confidence to say, ooh, that’s a really difficult question. Do you mind if I take a moment to think about it, went up in my estimation than people who um’d and ah’d their way through an answer.

Jon Gregory: Indeed; absolutely.

James: When people are completely stumped by a question, when their mind goes blank, what tips would you give them?

Jon Gregory: I would say, don’t be afraid to say, to be honest I don’t know. I’m not sure. My mind has gone completely blank. Let me think for a moment. And again, sit back and just spend a few seconds. Again, it looks quite classy. It is possible to get caught on the hop but what I would always say is, if you’ve done your research at the front end, if you’ve done your preparation, the chances of you being caught in that situation are quite slim. It all comes down to that preparation. And you know, hence the use of the Spotlight process.

I would say things like competency questions as well, there’s a technique called the STAR technique for dealing with these which enables you to deal with questions on the fly. So for competency question, tell me about a time where, you know, you have to do so and so. If you think about what the STAR stands for: firstly “S”, situation. Think about a situation you were in previously. The “T” stands for task. Think about the task that you then have to carry out. The “A” is for action. Think about what actions you took during this. And then think about the result; “R” for result. So clinging on to that STAR acronym, as questions come at you and you can think okay. And so it breaks it down into at least four steps and you can work through logically. And to be honest, again if you’ve done your preparation reasonably well what you’ll find is that your subconscious is delivering on the “S”, leaving you to think about the “T” and that will make you considerably more relaxed and make you appear considerably more confident. It’s a very good technique for dealing with those unexpected questions.

James: I notice one that is becoming more and more common in how people answer questions, just to give you that structure to then go through and answer them.

And finally as will come at the end of the interview, the interview is over and the interviewer then turns it over to you for the classic, do you have any questions for me? What would you recommend is the best tactic here?

Jon Gregory: The best tactic is to have two or three questions that you can ask at that point, that are reasonably insightful and that can show that you’ve really understood how your role fits into the organization. So that would be the primary area.

The second one is to try and also use that, perhaps to further build the relationship or cement the relationship with the interviewer. So, for example, yeah, you’ve worked here for some period of time. How have you found it from the point of view of your career and how hard was it to settle into the culture here? Or, can you tell me a bit about the culture, the work culture here? Those sorts of things are getting the interviewer in fact to come back to you with something personal.   Again, if you can do that, and they’ll do that freely, again, and it’s all part of that bridge building and bond building.

What I would do is go in with possibly a dozen or so questions that you could ask. But just expect that quite a few of them would have been dealt with during the course of the interview. As they make an introduction they may well cover most of your questions.   Just make sure you’ve got at least one or two to ask at the end and if they haven’t covered any of them, don’t bang all about all twelve. Just pick two or three, do those, and then hand it back to the interviewer with a view to winding this up.

James: Yep; no, really good advice. People love talking about themselves. So it’s always good to turn the question back. Although, as you mentioned, there’s nothing worse than at the end of an interview when people, you ask them if they have any questions and then they ask you something which you’ve already explained or covered, it ends the interview on not the best point.

Jon Gregory: It’s fatal. Yeah, it really is.

James: Excellent, Jon. Unfortunately we’re out of time.   You’ve given an amazing insight into how people can go about interviews and I wish I had that knowledge when I was doing them myself.

Before we close, what’s the best way for people to, you know, get in touch with you and the work that you do?

Jon Gregory: Easiest way – Two easiest ways. Number one is on Twitter and I Tweet from @letsfirewalk, or via the website that I edit and blog from which is win-that-job.com. The “win that job” is hyphenated. Those are the two easiest ways to pick me up and I’m always happy to help with free advice to the extent that I can. My objective is to make in-depth advice on the tools, training, techniques that people can use much more accessible.

James: Actually, I personally highly recommend Jon’s book Winning That Job which you can be able to see in the show notes on the website.

Jon Gregory: That’s very kind, thank you.

James: No, no. Thank you very much for your time and thank you very much for appearing in the Graduate Job Podcast.

Jon Gregory: It’s absolutely my pleasure, James; anytime.

James: There you go, episode 1 in the bag, thanks again to Jon Gregory for the great advice, the spotlight process is a real winner, so listen to that section as many times as you need to till that advice sinks in. The full transcript of today’s episode can be found at graduatejobpodcast.com/amazinginterviews. Please do get in touch via twitter @gradjobpodcast, or via the website, graduatejobpodcast.com. Finally please do leave a review on Itunes, Itunes algorithms place much value on the number of reviews, especially 5 star ones and it will be a great way for new listeners to find us. Do join us next week when we have bestselling author Denise Taylor discussing assessment centres,

I hope you enjoyed the episode today, but more importantly, I hope you use it and act on it. See you next week.

3 comments on “Episode 1 – Amazing job interviews with Jon Gregory”
  1. Andy G says:
    December 12, 2014 at 9:05 am

    Really enjoyed the first episode, look forward to listening in every week.

    1. James C says:
      December 15, 2014 at 6:41 am

      Thanks Andy, glad you’re enjoying the show!

  2. AndyGuptan says:
    February 19, 2015 at 11:26 pm

    Really like the spotlight technique, one that I’ve been trying to use and think it’s working. I’m certainly sounding alot more natural than I was before. Cheers

Comments are closed.